Commonwealth v. Hunt, (1842), American legal case in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the common-law doctrine of criminal conspiracy did not apply to labour unions. Until then, workers’ attempts to establish closed shops had been subject to prosecution. Chief JusticeLemuel Shaw asserted, however, that trade unions were legal and that they had the right to strike or take other steps of peaceful coercion to raise wages and ban nonunion workers.

Lemuel Shaw.

The case stemmed from a demand by the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers’ Society that an employer fire one of its members who had disobeyed the society’s rules. The employer, fearing a strike, complied, but the dismissed employee complained to the district attorney, who then drew an indictment charging the society with conspiracy. The Boston Municipal Court found the union guilty.

Justice Shaw, hearing the case on appeal, altered the traditional criteria for conspiracy by holding that the mere act of combining for some purpose was not illegal. Only those combinations intended “to accomplish some criminal or unlawful purpose, or to accomplish some purpose, not in itself criminal or unlawful, by criminal or unlawful means” could be prosecuted. Shaw, in effect, legalized the American labour union movement by this decision.

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in common law, an agreement between two or more persons to commit an unlawful act or to accomplish a lawful end by unlawful means. Conspiracy is perhaps the most amorphous area in Anglo-American criminal law. Its terms are vaguer and more elastic than any conception of conspiracy to be found in the...

January 9, 1781 Barnstable, Massachusetts, U.S. March 30, 1861 Boston chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (1830–60), who left an indelible mark on the law of that state and significantly contributed to the structure of American law.